What Is the Nature of Managerial Work, What Purpose Does It Serve and How Has It Changed?

What is the nature of managerial work, what purpose does it serve and how has it changed?

To portray managerial work, one finds oneself lost in the various research, theory, and empirical evidence, which have been accumulating over the past 100 years. It seems that nobody has really come up with a credible and universal definition of managerial work. From this plethora of ideas, this essay will highlight the most crucial aspects to managerial work, which is important to understand because the manager's job is "vital" to society, (Mintzberg, 1990). Hence the key to the essay is how the managers and management academics fuse ideas together to create the functioning organization. The managerial work, therefore, shall be examined in the context of those who are managers in organizations.

From the very definition of managerial work, there is a strong contrast between work defined theoretically or socially. This essay will highlight the divergence between the theory and practice of management, and why it is important to society as a whole so that by understanding what it is, it can be improved to yield useful social benefits.

Therefore this essay will concentrate on what is meant by managerial work, why this is important and how this work has been changing over time, so that some ideas can be drawn on how this information can be used to improve the quality of life.

The essay will assume that organizations have managerial hierarchies - i.e. the CEO, the sales director and the foreman are all managers, with diminishing overall authority as the position shifts from top to bottom level. These 3 levels of management may be labelled the managerial elite, middle management and first-line management respectively (Reed, 1989). As this implies that these managers will have different specific tasks, it is more effective to look at the commonalities in their work characteristics to see what distinguishes them from other employees. Decision making is an integral element to work, carried out by all employees to some degree, but "the management still control the distributed decision making process and are responsible for its conclusions" (Spender, 1989).

This essay will contrast Fayol's (1916) Classical theory views with the modern Work Activity School (WAS) approach, Mintzberg's term (1973), pioneered by Carlson (1951). It will be discussed whether these two ways of understanding what managers do are relevant to practice. Grint (1995) states that Stewart (1994) claims that the study of management workers' functions began with Carlson's research in 1951, whereas any prior theory was compiled by management theorist speculation. Hence it can be seen that the theme of theory and practice differential is recurrent in the essay.

Fayol's (1916) traditional Classical theory views takes the implication that managers' duties are shaped by their tasks, the key roles of management work are the planning, organizing, coordinating, commanding and controlling resources within the organization (Fayol, 1916 in Grint, 1995). The manager is therefore seen as an executioner of "clear-cut" duties ( Grint, 1995:48), which lead him to take an informed, systematic approach to his work. The implications of this view are that the manager will systematically plan by contemplating what tasks need to be done, when and how and that he will organize these by job division. He would coordinate labour and capital within the organization to the best use, in his view, direct them to the tasks, and enforce that the ultimate aim of the organization is reached (adapted from Fayol, (1916) in Grint (1995)). Hence a systematic and independent approach is necessary for the Classical School view to be relevant in practice. What has been shown to be the case, by numerous empirical studies, is that empirical management environment is imperfect in contrast to the theoretical surroundings. Managers often find that they are unable to differentiate or quantify these activities, and so this theory does not much apply to modern real world managers (Mintzberg, 1990).

The fundamentally different notion in the Work Activity School is that first systematic analysis is carried out which then results in the characteristics of managerial work, rather than the conclusions being conceived initially, and then being applied to empirical management, as is the case in the Classical School. Empirical research spanning Carlson (1951), Stewart (1967) and Mintzberg (1968) among others showed that managerial work was "talk-oriented" through "articulation of orders and requests to subordinates or peers" (Grint, 1995:48). Mintzberg (1973) categorized the talk-oriented function into 10 interrelated roles of 3 complementary groups: interpersonal, informational and decisional. The empirical manager would therefore act as figurehead to represent his organization, network with other people of status as liaison and define the relationships with subordinates as leader within the interpersonal group. Due to the arising information, the manager would understand his organization better by handling the information as monitor, act as disseminator and spokesman by directing this information to relevant people in the organization and its environment respectively within the informational group. The gathering of this information enables the manager to make strategic decisions in the decisional group as an entrepreneur by initiating change, as disturbance handler in reaction to situations partially beyond his control, as resource allocator by making choices based on historic and future information and as negotiator by consulting with other relevant organizations.

This does not imply that one manager is expected to perform all of those roles equally, rather Mintzberg (1990:172-3) observed that managers in different vocational areas seemed to concentrate more on different roles, for example production managers were more involved in decisional roles as they were concerned about the efficiency of the work flow.

Therefore, it seems that managers are mostly reactive to their environment, mainly concerned with short-term decisions and governed by uncertainty, implied by Stewart (1983) in Reed (1989).

It is misleading to think that the WAS approach gives a correct portrayal of managerial work. As has been implied in literature, the empirical research is subject to bias and to statistical error, for example Mintzberg's study was limited to 5 CEOs, which may not give an accurate representation to the managerial population. It has been established that managerial work is so varied that it is difficult to distinguish between those who are management workers and those who are not. Those who argue that managers are defined by task say that managers